The NetBSD Foundation Quarterly Report: October - December 2004

Quarterly Status Reports

NetBSD is an actively developed operating system. With fifty four
different system architectures in total and binary support of over 48
architectures in our last official release (NetBSD 2.0), our widely
portable Packages Collection “pkgsrc” and large userbase
there is a lot going
on within the project. In order to allow our users to follow the most
important changes over the last few months, we provide a brief summary
in these official status reports on a regular basis. These status
reports are suitable for reproduction and publication in part or in
whole as long as the source is clearly indicated.

October - December 2004

The last three months of 2004 were full of exciting developments within the
NetBSD Project. Not only did the new official NetBSD Logo get announced (with
all the hoopla and discussions about the choice this bikeshed-prone topic
solicits), but we also released the much anticipated NetBSD 2.0 and the
Packages Team created a new stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4.

But the last quarter also brought some problems: the 2.0 release went through
several Release Candidates in October and November before the final release
was unfortunately held back by a hardware failure of the main release
engineering server. Together with the recent failure of the anoncvs server
this meant significant expenses for this volunteer project. If you would like
to help us out with a tax-deductible donation, please contact
<finance-exec@NetBSD.org>.

Other development and news during the fourth quarter of 2004 within NetBSD in
details:

Administrative

releng.NetBSD.org down [20041019]

The NetBSD Project runs a machine to continuously build binary
snapshots of the latest development version, NetBSD-current, as well
as the latest stable branch, currently netbsd-2, on a daily base. The
machine is also used during release cycles to assemble releases, but
due to hardware failure, the machine was closed down, and the release
had to be assembled manually for all 48 binary platforms that NetBSD
2.0 supports. We hope to bring back this service soon, to offer binary
updates to users who are either interested in latest development
snapshots or snapshots from the stable branch.

anoncvs down due to random memory corruption [20041223]

The NetBSD anoncvs server, anoncvs.NetBSD.org, suffered random memory
corruption in December and had to be taken offline. The NetBSD Administration
Team is in the process of diagnosing and repairing the problem. The anonymous
CVS server will be unavailable until we can find a replacement machine or
repair the current one. In the meantime, you can download the tar file
available from ftp.NetBSD.org. The tar files of -current (the head of the CVS
tree) are updated daily and are located in:
/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current.

New Developers [20050101]

S.P.Zeidler <spz>, who will be working on administration,
Documentation and odds & ends.

Peter Postma <peter>, who will be working on pf and the
NetBSD Packages Collection.

Kouichirou Hiratsuka <hira>, who will be working on the NetBSD
Packages Collection and bug fixing.

Miscellaneous

EuroBSDCon [20041029]

EuroBSDCon 2004 took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, from October 29th to October
31st. The NetBSD Project had a strong presence, dominating the conference
with a total of 11 (out of 23) papers presented either by NetBSD developers or
on NetBSD related topics, with topics including binary compatibility with
Mac OS X, cross-compilation of pkgsrc, deploying NetBSD as a scalable desktop
solution and handheld Desktop machines (among others).

The NetBSD Project also set up a merchandise booth to advocate NetBSD, inform
users, answer questions and sell t-shirts, CDs and other goodies.

New Logo [20041030]

On October 30th, the NetBSD Project's new official logo was announced. The
logo was selected out of over 400 submissions by 238 artists. The winning
logo was submitted by Grant Bissett, a new media designer from Perth,
Western Australia.

Members of the NetBSD Foundation voted for the new logo from a short-list of
six submitted designs selected by the logo committee. Characteristics
important for the new logo were simplicity, appealing form and color choice,
and identification with the project.

The new logo, which features a flag, is used on the NetBSD.org website and
will be used for software media, apparel, advertisements, promotional
materials, and the NetBSD Foundation literature.

As was anticipated, the choice of the logo was surrounded by lengthy
discussions and much feedback. It is worth noting, however, that the choice
of a new logo does not mean the abandonment of the mascot, the beloved daemon.

NetBSD 2.0 released [20041209]

NetBSD 2.0, the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, was
released on December 9th. This release, which includes binary distributions
for 48 architectures continues our long tradition with major improvements in
file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements,
and support for many new platforms and peripherals.

The addition of a native threads implementation for all platforms and
symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) on i386 and other popular platforms were
long-standing goals for NetBSD 2.0. Both of these goals have now been met --
SMP support has been added for i386, SPARC, and PowerPC, the SMP support on
Alpha and VAX has been improved, and the new port to the 64-bit AMD/Opteron
also supports SMP.

NetBSD Live CD runs contest [20041119]

Many Open Source projects pride themselves in providing a Live CD to allow
users to test their OS without having to install it. Of course NetBSD does
also provide such a Live CD, but much more than that, the NetBSD Live CD can
easily be customized and be used for many purposes.

A custom NetBSD 2.0-Beta Live CD, developed by Jan Schaumann using the
sysutils/mklivecd package was used to run the ACM Greater New York
Regional Programming Contest in November, hosted at Stevens Institute of
Technology.

pkgsrc

New supported platform: DragonFlyBSD [20041031]

The NetBSD Packages Collection was ported to yet another platform on October
31st 2004. The newest OS to benefit from pkgsrc is DragonFlyBSD, support for
which was provided by Todd Willey on the tech-pkg mailinglist.

Changes to the Packages Collection in October [20041109]

At the end of October 2004, there were 5083 packages in the NetBSD
Packages Collection, up from 5011 the previous month, a rise of 72.
The Package of the Month award goes to
audio/daapd, which scans
a directory for mp3 files and makes them available via the Apple
proprietary protocol DAAP. DAAP clients can browse the directory and
retrieve individual files, either by streaming or by downloading them.
There are some DAAP clients in pkgsrc/audio, and iTunes can play the
MP3s served by daapd. My thanks to Nathan Williams for packaging this.

New supported platform: OSF/1 [20041120]

The NetBSD Packages Collection was ported to yet another platform on November
20th, 2004. The newest OS to benefit from pkgsrc is OSF/1, support for
which was imported by Grant Beattie.

Changes to the Packages Collection in November [20041201]

At the end of November 2004, there were 5190 packages in the NetBSD Packages
Collection, up from 5083 the previous month, a rise of 107. The Package of
the Month award for November 2004 goes to emulators/qemu,
nominated by a huge number of people including Matt Green, Hubert Feyrer, Nick
Hudson, and, according to Quentin Garnier, "anybody who gave qemu a try".
qemu is a very fast dynamic-translating CPU emulator, which can give you a
number of virtual machines all running at good emulation speeds.

New pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch [20041221]

After a two week long freeze on the pkgsrc repository, the NetBSD Packages
Team cut the pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch, obsoleting pkgsrc-2004Q3 as the currently
maintained and stable pkgsrc branch. Among many other things, this new branch
includes support for two new platforms (OSF/1 and DragonFlyBSD), an improved
infrastructure for non-NetBSD platforms and improved support for non-gcc
compilers.

and you can use the "pkgsrc-2004Q4" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org and any of the mirrors.

Dates set for pkgsrcCon '05 [20041122]

After the widely successfull pkgsrcCon '04
last Spring in Vienna, the
planning of the upcoming pkgsrcCon '05 immediately begun, and the
final time and place were announced in November:

pkgsrcCon '05 will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, from May 6 -
May 8, 2005. pkgsrcCon is a technical conference for people working
on the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc), focusing on existing
technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc
infrastructure. Developers, contributors, and users are all welcome to
attend.

Changes to the Packages Collection in December [20050104]

At the end of December 2004, there were 5266 packages in the NetBSD Packages
Collection, up from 5190 the previous month, a rise of 76. Among the many
changes, updates and additions are new versions of kde, gnome, and an addition
of a wiki. The first annual Alistair Crooks "My Name on All Files" award
goes to Grant Beattie for his updates of perl5 packages.

As part of the infrastructure, pkg_install utilities were modified to use a
large buffer for full path names, even on operating systems which don't use
the Berkeley FFS.

The Package of the Month award goes to: graphics/graphviz, nominated
by many people including Andrew Brown, Dan McMahill, and Alistair Crooks.

sparc64: important stability fix [20041201]

A very important commit that fixes a long-term stability problem for sparc64
(which due to other changes had become very annoying lately) was committed on
December 1st. This commit
fixes PRs 24126, 25669 and 27730, and while it unfortunately did not make it into 2.0,
the patch applies cleanly.

evbarm: NetBSD ported to TS-7200 [20041224]

Jesse Off <joff@NetBSD.org> has committed support for the TS-7200 into the
NetBSD/evbarm port. The TS-7200 is a low-cost mass-produced PC/104 embedded
single board computer intended as a general purpose core for real embedded
applications. The TS-7200 uses the Cirrus Logic EP9302 ARM9 system-on-chip
and comes with a PC/104 (isa) bus and can either boot to CompactFlash or
onboard flash. The board also has general purpose digital IO and optional
multichannel analog-to-digital converters. More information on the TS-7200 can
be found at http://www.embeddedarm.com/epc/ts7200-spec-h.html.

Technical

ptyfs imported [20041111]

Christos Zoulas has committed a ptyfs implementation in November 2004. This
was done to get rid of all the tty and pty files in /dev and is needed for
COMPAT_LINUX. See Christos' implementation notes in hist message to the
tech-kern mailing list at
http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-kern/2004/11/08/0016.html.

OpenPAM imported [20041212]

Christos Zoulas has imported OpenPAM
``Eeelgrass'' into the base system on December 12th, 2004.

OpenPAM is an open source PAM library that focuses on simplicity,correctness,
and cleanliness. It is specified in the X/Open Document Number P702.

bind 9.3, file 4.12, pf 3.6 and postfix 2.1.5 imported

Among the many significant source changes in the last three months, there were
the update of Bind to 9.3 (20041106 by Christos Zoulas), file 4.12 (20041213
by Antti Kantee), pf 3.6 (20041114 by YAMAMOTO Takashi) and postfix 2.1.5
(20041113 by John Heasley).